Baltic Seaside Resorts As Soviet Tourist Destinations
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“You have probably heard about all this ...” Baltic Seaside Resorts as Soviet Tourist Destinations by Christian Noack Towards the end of the Soviet period, tourism planners in Moscow commissioned a socio- logical survey to establish their compatriots’ preferences for annual summer holidays. As it turned out, the Baltic republics of the USSR emerged as the third most popular destination after the Crimea and the Caucasian coast. About ten per cent of the respondents answered that they wished to spend their holidays in Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania. This was the highest rating for any region outside the Black Sea littoral and the Caucasus. The Soviet ‘Mediter- ranean’ would have attracted almost half of the respondents; and in fact this was the part of the Soviet Union with the best tourism infrastructure. In practice, however, Soviet citizens could not simply expect to see their wishes fulfilled due to the chronic shortages of putevki, or travel vouchers, in the state sponsored Soviet holiday facilities run by the trade unions. Of those interviewed, only every second respondent could realistically hope to spend the summer on the shores of either the Black or the Baltic Seas: If Black Sea and Caucasian destinations catered to less than a quarter of all “organised” Soviet vacationers, the Baltic resorts could accommodate only about five per cent.1 Thus the Baltic republics were popular Soviet destinations, and why would they not be? They were reasonably close to the industrial centres of the northwest, including Leningrad or Belorussia. If the Baltic republics lacked the dramatic aspects of the Black Sea or Caucasus region, their oriental tinge or their sub-tropical climate, they had other attractions to offer, like the length of the coast line and its natural beauty, the calm of the hilly and forested hinterland. Beyond this, the rich cultural heritage of medieval towns shaped the Baltic republics’ outlook as more European than any other part of the USSR. My inquiry into Russian and, later, Soviet tourism in Baltic resorts will focus on the three most important seaside spas in each republic, Pärnu in Estonia, Jurmala in Latvia and Palanga in Lithuania. As the first section shows, the history of the Baltic resorts as a destination for Russian tourists dates back to the 19th century. While tourists, particularly from St Petersburg, frequented Baltic spas and resorts, the emergence of a major Imperial city within the region, Riga, was of even greater importance for tourist development. Riga developed into an industrial hub and a multi-ethnic town with significant Latvian, German, Russian and Jewish populations, and the city would remain the most important “provider” of tourists in numerical terms. The following section examines how Russian tourism was only shortly interrupted by revolution and civil war. Although war damage and the drawing 1 “Fakticheskaia organizatsiia ezhegodnogo otdykha zaniatnogo naseleniia i pozhelaniia na budushchee” [The Factual Organisation of the Working Population’s Annual and Desires for the Future], internal report of the Tsentral’nyi nauchno-issledovatel’skii i proektnyi institut tipogo eksperimental’nogo proektirovaniia lechebno-ozdorovitel’nykh i sanatorno-kurortnykh zdanii, Moscow, ca. 1986. Quoted from Monika Henningsen: Der Freizeit- und Fremdenverkehr in der ehemaligen Sowjetunion unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Baltischen Raumes, Frankfurt a.M. 1994, pp. 86 f. 200 Abhandlungen of borders created obstacles for the development of tourism, Russians continued to visit the Baltic shores between 1920 and 1940. In both 1940 and 1944–45, the Soviet occupants found the existing tourist infrastructure relatively well preserved, and section two of the article deals with the repeated Sovietisation of vacationing in the Baltics. While there was little development until the early 1960s, Soviet planners then aimed at establishing a “tourist industry” which would enable “mass tourism”. Section three will inquire into the changes that occurred in the wake of these decisions: to what extent were the Baltic resorts fully absorbed into the Soviet system of state sponsored tourism? How were natural and cultural resources exploited for tourism, and which development perspectives were pursued in the three Baltic republics? What role, in particular, did “unorganised” tourism, as opposed to planned vacationing, play in the region? Indeed, the number of “wild” tourists (as those who travelled individually were called) rose disproportionately, meaning that the “unorganised tourist” as a rule far outnumbered the organised and badly strained the rather inflexible Soviet supply chains in the resorts. As will be discussed in section three, the decades between 1960 and 1990 saw not only a considerable extension of the state sponsored network of recreational and tourist facilities, but also serious attempts to cater to the needs of vacationers travelling without the holiday vouchers distributed by Soviet trade unions. I argue that achievements and failures in the accommodation of unplanned tourism amply illustrate both the scope and the limits of late Soviet modernisation policies. The final part of the article returns to the initial question of supply and demand. While available written sources do not tell us much about choices and decisions of individual Soviet tourists travelling to the Baltic Sea, we can at least analyse how the Baltic destinations were represented in Soviet media. What kind of imagery was produced for the Baltic region as whole, for the individual republics and for the most important individual destinations? And in how far were these representations used to advertise vacations for a broader Soviet audience (basically outside the Baltic republics), thus turning them into genuinely Soviet destinations? 1. Baltic resorts between empire and national states, 1840–1940 In the Russian Empire and in Central or Western Europe domestic travel and tourism developed ultimately along similar lines, if one allows for the usual delay with which impulses of modernisation penetrated the eastern great power. “Taking waters” had been one of the habits of the European nobility Peter the Great encountered and subsequently tried to have his Russian peers emulate. Due to the fact that a majority of Russia’s wealthy landowning class preferred to travel to European spas rather than staying in Russia for cures, it would take about another century after the Tsar’s death before a network of health resorts emerged within the Empire proper, basically in the recently annexed Caucasian foothills. Piatigorsk, for example, was founded only in 1830 and became a popular destination visited by officers and civil servants who could not afford to travel to Marienbad or Wiesbaden.2 2 Kurorty. Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ [Spas. Encyclopedia], Moscow 1983, pp. 19-21, 282 f. NOA 20/2011 Christian Noack: Baltic Seaside Resorts as Soviet Tourist Destinations 201 In the course of the 19th century, other forms of leisurely vacation developed on the littoral of the Black Sea, particularly on the Crimea. Catherine had symbolically taken possession of the peninsula with her famous 1787 journey, and the imperial household began to spend summers there more regularly after the acquisition of the Livadia estate and the erection of the famous palace of the same name. Soon afterwards mountaineering clubs emerged on the Crimea and in the Caucasus. At first affluent families began to travel south, latter middle classes joined them, firmly establishing the “Russian Riviera” and the “Russian Alps” on the mental maps of early Russian tourists. Still seasonal travelling from Petersburg to the Black Sea required substantial means, and a railway link, momentously absent during the Crimean War, was not established until 1894.3 The geographical proximity of the Baltic region to St Petersburg, on the contrary, des- ignated it to become a prime recreational area for the inhabitants of the imperial capital.4 Indeed, St. Petersburg’s service class, among them numerous descendants from the Baltic German nobility, retreated to estates in the Baltic provinces during the summer seasons, as did their peers owing land in Russia or Ukraine.5 A number of other factors facilitated the development of tourism in the north. Firstly, travellers began to appreciate, starting in the late 18th century, the sublime aspects of north- ern landscapes, earlier a preserve of the Mediterranean sites of antiquity.6 Secondly, as in the case of Crimea, the Imperial family acted as a trendsetter. Their habit of yachting in Finland7 was emulated by the nobility and later, the middle classes. For the latter, thirdly, railway construction rendered seasonal mobility more affordable. It began earlier in the north of the country, where the first stretches of the St. Petersburg – Helsingfors railway to Beloostrov were opened in 1870. Summer houses and boats in Finland rapidly became fashionable. Cheap railway fares helped to turn the Karelian Isthmus on both sides of the border with the Grand Duchy into a very popular area for the construction of dachas.8 A similar development could be observed on Estonian soil near the town of Narva. Indeed, some of the stretches on Estonia’s northern coast resembled the Finish counterparts. St. Pe- tersburg’s middle classes, among them many well know writers like Goncharov or Leskov, 3 See Andrei Mal’gin: Russkaia Riv’era. Kurorty, turizm i otdykh v Krymu v epokhu Imperii konets XVIII nachalo XX v [The Russian Riviera: Spas., Tourism and Recreation in Crimea during the Imperial Periods, 18th – early 20th Centuries], Simferopol’ 2006. For mountaineering Gennadii P. Dolzhenko: Istoriia turizma v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii and i SSSR [A History of Tourism in Pre-Revolutionary Russia and in the USSR], Rostov-on-Don 1988, pp. 20-40; Eva Maurer: Wege zum Pik Stalin. Sowjetische Alpinisten, 1928–1953, Zurich 2010, pp. 51-71. 4 Louise McReynolds: The Prerevolutionary Russian Tourist: Commercialization in the Nineteenth Century, in: Ann E Gorsuch, Diane P. Koenker (eds.): Turizm. The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism, Ithaca 2006, pp. 7-42, here pp.